About
Andrea Castro

Teaching

I started teaching Spanish at the Department of Romance Languages as a doctoral student and have taught at all levels in the first, second and third cycles . And I teach within the fields I enjoy the most: fiction and literary theory. I also teach academic writing and supervise thesis work. I’m very interested in the role of fiction in language instruction, but also as a cultural and transcultural source of knowledge.

I also teach classes at the Department of Comparative literature and within the International Language Programme. I have taught a course at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and given lectures at a number of universities both in Sweden and abroad.

I have worked and continue to work a great deal with the opportunities offered by digital media in creating an interactive and flexible learning environment. However, after all these years I have come to realise that I prefer the on-campus seminar format, where people can meet physically and discuss topics face-to-face.

I have also worked to develop our thesis courses and have authored textbooks. I have for example co-edited the book Historia de las literaturas hispánicas. Aproximaciones críticas, published by Studentlitteratur in 2013.

I supervise doctoral students at third-cycle level, four of whom have defended their doctoral theses: Fredrik Olsson (2015), Sofía García Nespereira (2017), Eduardo Jiménez Tornatore (2018) and Gabriela Mercado (2019). I am currently main supervisor for Emma Magnusson and assistant supervisor for Catharina Wolcott and Therese Svensson.

Research

From the genre of fantastic literature in Argentinian and Latin-American literature viewed from a comparative perspective, I have progressed to studying other literature from around the turn of the century in Argentina. I have for example taken an interest in literature by writers who immigrated to Argentina during this period as well as in translation problems. From 2008 to 2010, I received STINT’s (the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education) network grant for the project Intersection of Discourses and Repertoires in Fin de Siécle Latin America together with researchers from the University of Valencia (Spain), University of California Los Angeles (USA) and University of Buenos Aires and National University of La Pampa (Argentina). I’m involved in several international networks focusing on 19th century Spanish literature and culture.

I have also conducted research within literature didactics, focusing in particular on issues concerning how to read fiction and other texts/genres. In this context, I have participated in the research project Defamiliarization and Desautomatization. Approaches to Literature in Academic Teaching Situations, which in 2009 published an anthology with the same title.

I have studied the relationships between language, memory and identity in contemporary literature, particularly in the work of writer María Negroni. Within this field, I have co-edited the book De nómades y migrantes. Desplazamientos en la literatura, el cine y el arte hispanoamericanos, which was published in 2015 by Argentinian publisher Beatriz Viterbo.

In 2014, I was involved in the project Language for Education, funded by the Grundtvig Institute at the University of Gothenburg and coordinated by Magnus Pettersson Ängsal. A publication in Swedish was presented in 2015.

The podcast Poesía al paso was launched in May 2016 and is an outreach project I started with Azucena Castro, PhD student in Spanish at the Department of Romance Studies and Classics, Stockholm University. In the podcast, we read poetry in Spanish on select themes. It can be downloaded via iTunes and accessed via SoundCloud.